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What Game Devs Should Learn From EVE
An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Gamesradar about EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group of elected player representatives that serve to facilitate communications between the developers and the community:
"On the last day, the devs announced that after the earlier discussions about improving the CSM’s ability to effect change, the CSM was being raised to the status of its own department within CCP. This is revolutionary; in one swift move, the CSM went from what could be considered a glorified focus group to what CCP considers to be a 'stakeholder' in the company, given equal consideration with every other department in requesting development time for a project. That means the CSM — and the entire playerbase it represents — has as much influence on development projects as Marketing, Accounting, Publicity and all the other teams outside of the development team. This is, of course, the stated intention. But has any developer gone to such lengths for its fans?"
Maybe if we ask people what they want and then give it to them, they will tell their friends, blog positively, continue to subscribe to our subscription-based service instead of wandering off in boredom.
The Internet makes a lot of things possible when it comes to unprecedented communication between suppliers and consumers. Of course, this only works if you believe your users know what they want.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
EVE is so popular. It's not a game (anymore). Everyone takes it very seriously.
CCP even hired economists to be able to cope with in-game markets...
The only problem is the CSM has no mandate. They do not represent the players. They're elected by 4-6% of the player base.
The whole thing is widely viewed with scorn by the player base. Election turn outs make the states look good. Most candidates are viewed as fanboys wanting a free trip to iceland.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Why does it take 1 second on my cellphone to preview my post? Because processing power has little to no correlation with Internet responsiveness.
I believe this is the first time in its history that a videogame focus group has been given an official role within the Chinese Communist Party. Congratulations comrades!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Shame that good MMORPGs don't make financial sense and MMORPGs that make financial sense aren't good.
Eve is a very hard game to play. There are almost no other games with a learning curve as steep as Eve's, and certainly no MMOs. This has as a consequence that Eve has a relatively small player base. A further consequence of the small player base is that CCP, the company that makes Eve, needs to make sure that they can retain as many players as possible and not run the risk of making the player base so angry with any mistake so as to lose a significant amount of players. In a bigger MMO, this would perhaps be less consequential, but in Eve it would seriously damage the game.
The CSM (player voted representatives) came about as a consequence of the discovery by an Eve player that Eve devs were seriously cheating in game, aiding their own side with expensive items. The player reaction to that one, in a game which is already very hard, threatened to torpedo the game. So CCP created the CSM to represent player issues to CCP.
However, CCP never took the CSM seriously, resulting in the current lack of trust in CCP's willingness to take its customers seriously (CCP actually told the last CSM that they were not actually interested in the majority of the players but only in a subsection that lived in a specific "elite" part of Eve space). The resulting lack of belief in CCP and the CSM has led to widespread protests against voting for the CSM and CCP has once again relented by now making the CSM a "stakeholder" in the game.
This is, however, cosmetic, as there have been no commitments by CCP to actually take the player wishes any more seriously than they currently do. I personally would not hold my breath to see if anything positive comes of this. CCP has downgraded the CSM before (from its original oversight function to a merely representative one) and will very likely do so again once the current bad PR dies down again.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill
There is a reason democracy works with majority rule, because if you had to listen to every single individual, every stakeholder in the country, you would never get anything done and run a real risk of ending up listening to the loudest party.
In MMO land, the loudest party is often the Player Killer. PK ala Ultima Online, so beloved it was ripped from that game and every western game released after it that didn't have it did better. Yes UO fans, UO might have been first, it might have done things no other game has done BUT it also didn't manage to get a large number of subscribers. According to wikipedia it PEAKED at 250.000. Eve claims to have reached 300.000 and that game is considered to be niche. So a small game by a no-name developer working with its own IP has reached more subscribers then a triple A title working with a well known IP. That should tell you something.
Of course, UO did launch before broadband connections were common and was exploring newer ground, and of course popularity says nothing about quality, but read posts about MMO discussions sometime. Just how can it be that so many claim UO is the best when so few played it? More people have played EVE. A SHIT load more played Everquest. Even Star Wars Galaxies reached more people.
If the PK in UO was the thing to have, then UO would have reached more people. In fact, if PvP was so popular, then pure PvP games would do better. But Darkfall, Age of Conan and indeed EVE aren't doing all that well compared to PvE heavier titles like Lord of the Rings Online and of course World of Warcraft. So do you as a developer listen to the countless forum posts demanding unrestricted player killing and full body loot? They are certainly vocal, so surely that is what the players want? Well yes, on the forums, not when it comes to actually playing and PAYING for the game.
I have made the mistake of following the forums of several games in the past before I grew up and you can see a certain trend, the people who are playing and PAYING are to busy to be on the forum. EVE might be an exception here, because it is by its nature far more of a game where you organize outside the game world, it is a business sim to many and so the forums might actually be useful for other things then ranting. But this is not the case on many game forums. If you go to the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic site you can find half the posts demanding it to be free-to-play or else the poster won't play it without paying for it (the horror!) and the other half trying to come up with someway to make it seem attractive for other players to be their content (bounty hunters wanting PK but having wised up that they need to wrap it up in a pretty package). Real players have got better things to do, the game won't be out for a year, and really, Bioware probably already made their mind up about the game. Even if they wanted to listen to the forum posters (who are unlikely to be their full audience), where would you find the resources to implement everything? What do you pick?
Oh, the thingy that the forum posters wanted and you already wanted to do? Listening to your users, you run the severe risk of listening to yes-men. Just see the actions by people on this site. Don't like what someone says? mod them down. As a developer, if you are told by one person that you are doing the best job ever and another comes out with a detailed plan of how the game could be far far better but everything the developer believes and stands for is wrong, who does he listen to?
EVE might be in a luxury position in that it grew slowly and might have attracted an audience that wants to play the game that it is. But many titles, especially big budget ones attract all kinds, including people that should just play a different game. You probably won't find many EVE players demanding the game to be more solo friendly and that everyone should be able to afford the biggest ship after soloing for a month and then be able to do everything in the game. But that is EXACTLY what people demand in every other MMO.
Read some MMO forums, then tell me that listening to your audience is a good idea.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
that the easiest and cheapest way of finding new ways of pleasing their customers is listening to their opinions. The only difference between this and a traditional focus group is the size of the population sample.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
They don’t know how to make it fun. They are no experts in it. You know: Those who can’t design, play. ;)
They don’t know about the balance between too hard and too easy. About how changing something that people will think is stupid, will make gameplay more fun. After all it’s still supposed to be a game right, not just a simulation.
You obviously still have to listen to your players. But you have to interpret it trough experienced game designers, to find out what they really want and how to really make that happen. (As it will often be counterintuitive to the players.)
But oh well... as I said, I’m not really sure EvE still is a game, or rather an alternate reality, complete with everything. (Not that that is a bad thing. Let alone an uninteresting one.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Asking your player what he wants when you sell them a "normal" game, i.e. one that generates revenue at sale and never again, is pretty stupid. He already bought it. Changing a game to suit his needs is pretty much a waste of time. He will not buy it again. On the other hand, someone else who WOULD have bought it might not when you make the change.
MMOs on the other hand make most of their income from recurring subscriptions. Thus changing the game to make people play it longer does indeed give them a lot more money. So yes, it is very much in CCPs interest to do what its players want. Maybe not to the whole extent (hey, which player would refuse a few billion ISK? I guess that's something every player would enjoy!), but making changes that makes a lot of players play longer, or even make players who stopped playing to return, is a pretty good idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Voting for the new CSM finished just over 12 hours ago - so I guess it's a tie into the current CSM election
This is just the Student President scam. Let the children elect a representative, give them a neat title and even let them sit at the table with the grown ups. Heck, use them as your mouthpiece, and ask them to canvas their constituents if you like. But you don't have to actually listen to them. Why would you? They're just an annoying selfish greedy know-nothing kid, representing a group of annoying selfish greedy know-nothing kids. All they're there for is to act as a buffer to keep the baying and howling at a tolerable distance.
I've seen this faux consultation happen in other games through the years - Netrek, Navy Field - and here's the skinny: he who controls the server rules the universe.
Can this EVE council actually modify the server source? Can they even see it? No, of course not, because they're not really grown ups, or worthy of trust.
Judge them by their access, not their title.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The nice thing about EVE is that it's not grindy like WoW and other MMOs. The only thing that affects your rate of skill point acquisition in EVE is which skills you decide to train. You don't have to hunt for XP to level up. Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
Supposedly Slashdot checks to see if your IP address can be used as an open proxy. If you can find a way to accept the connection and immediately say "nope, not a proxy here" instead of having it timeout that would likely cut down the preview time.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That's a pretty interesting comparison there between EVE and Wyoming. One is a vast, desolate land where only the boldest and bravest dare leave what little pockets of civilization exist, and the other is EVE.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
People need to get some perspective on what a "niche" MMO is. When UO scored 250,000 players, or DAOC got up to comparable numbers, or EQ got to 500,000 subscribers - those were MAJOR SUCCESSES. No one could believe how popular those games were, with subscriber numbers like that, they were assured of long lives (and in fact DAOC is still hanging on by its fingernails, barely).
WOW came along and completely transformed the market. 11 Million subscribers as a base has so totally distored the market - and new player's understanding of what "successful" means, that now the old numbers cannot be seen in the correct perspective. Now, they look like "niche" games with barely acceptable numbers to people.
When Warhammer Online came out, people were saying if it didn't get at least 1m subscribers, it was a complete failure. I believe it got up to around 800,000 (in other words about as many subscribers as the original EQ and Starwars Galaxies ever had, at their peaks, combined). It was labeled a massive failure on the forums. People started saying they were leaving because it was a failure.
What changed? Just player's expectations, distorted by the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft. WOW has been so successful that the old stats from old games cannot be used when making measurements. The market increased in size immensely with WOW. A better way to look at things (but less immediately recognizable to readers) is to use market shares. Then at least the size of the total market pre-WOW and post-WOW is irrelevant.
EVE is doing just fine from what I can see. They identified a market, produced a game for that market, and they have 300,000 intensely loyal, paying customers. I am not sure what the subscription rate is, but assuming the standard $15 or so, that's about 4.5m a month. I dunno bout you but $54m per year looks pretty decent to me, and not very niche to be honest.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid